It's more of a throwback to Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, a rags-to-middle-class-respectability tale about the humble joy of old-fashioned decency.

| Nov 14, 2018

It's as corny as Kansas, but the mix of old fashioned heart and new fangled animatronic cyber tech will make this picture a winner for fathers and sons.

| Nov 14, 2018

All things considered, it is a well-wrought piece of entertainment, confidently paced, although its necessary subplots are little more than dutiful filler sandwiched between fight sequences.

| Nov 6, 2018

Real Steel plays like a glossy commercial lasting over 90 minutes.

| Mar 10, 2012

The whole thing is both entirely too routine as well as instantly forgettable, a tandem not exactly high on my list of cinematic virtues to extol.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 27, 2012

Battling to be heard above the metal-on-metal clangour is a heartwarming (read: terribly soppy) story of a broken family.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2011

Think of Real Steel as Robot Rocky with a heartfelt father/son overlay and you can't go wrong.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 18, 2011

Its remote-controlled emotional responses leave little room for genuine uplift.

| Oct 17, 2011

From the billboards you might think this is another Transformers movie-heaven help us-when in fact, Real Steel is a cross between Rocky and The Champ.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2011

This is 50 per cent violence and 50 per cent gross sentimentality - and in each half the clichés mount like a soufflé.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 14, 2011

It's an incredibly cynical movie, written and acted by robots, and boasting the most flagrant piece of product-placement for a certain soft drink.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 13, 2011

The fight scenes themselves are dead dull. Two motorised robots slugging it out? Big deal!

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 13, 2011

Giant Robots Punching Each Other: The Movie, starring Hugh Jackman.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 13, 2011

Big, dumb, but certainly fun.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 13, 2011

Satisfyingly sturdy and no-nonsense, a multiplex monster smartly constructed from tried-and-trusted parts.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 11, 2011

The Woman is a slow-burning incendiary device, a brutal satire on the sanctity of the nuclear family and its conservative "values."

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 10, 2011

It's not quite in Balboa's weight class, but Real Steel at least has some heft.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2011

Just plain unpleasant to sit through. So much of the movie is spent amid screaming crowds and abrasive music, often in dark, trashy dives.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 7, 2011

Surely a story as elementary and essentially derivative as this one could be told in less than 127 minutes.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 7, 2011

They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie Real Steal.

| Original Score: C | Oct 7, 2011